Living in an Artworld: Reviews and Essays on Dance, Performance, Theater, and the Fine Arts by Noël Carroll (review)

Any open-minded person curious about avant-garde art in New York City in the late 1960s or early 1970s encountered a fermenting stew, in which the ideas of choreographers, composers, theater directors, writers, and visual artists jostled against one another. Creators associated with minimalism were never timid about reducing dancing to walking, a sculpture to a railroad tie, music to two wrangling sounds, and theater that transgressed the spectator-performer boundary.

Noël Carroll was an adventurous observer back then. Now, after producing fifteen important books, Carroll—currently a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York's Graduate Center—has published Living in an Artworld, a collection of erudite, stimulating essays and reviews that he wrote for Artforum, The Village Voice, Soho Weekly News, and various scholarly journals. The writings cover a period ranging from the 1970s through the 1980s, with two from the 1990s and one from 2007. Three of those dealing with dance were coauthored by the dance critic and historian Sally Banes.

Carroll is an amiable and perceptive guide to the dance, theater, and gallery exhibitions that aroused his interest. He is also rigorous—examining works in diverse fields in relation to one another when relevant, and using them as fodder to illustrate his arguments and queries about, say, the minimalist aesthetic as a response to modernism, or the return of outspoken narrative and expression to the art of the 1980s as a counter to minimalism. He bores his intellect into a topic—tweezing generalities apart with a masterly precision.

Arthur C. Danto, who wrote the Foreword to Living in an Artworld ("Diderot Downtown: Noël Carroll's Critico-Philosophical Writings"), likens Carroll to a participant observer, one able to function within a culture yet retain a critical distance:

The closeness of Carroll to his subject comes from the tacit synesthesia of his prose, in which one can virtually, or faintly, as if in memory, smell the damp plaster, the peeling paint, the ancient grime and dust, or hear the steam of ancient radiators and the creaking floorboards of the decaying industrial spaces in which so much of this art must have been enacted.

(13)

The "closeness" that Danto notes is one of the things that makes Carroll's analysis of art works and the ideas embedded in them rewarding to read. For Carroll, the object he is writing about must stay in clear view. In his discussion of what he terms "alternate cultural criticism," as applied to dance, he supports applying a critical framework from a different discipline, provided it is appropriate to do so (perhaps in terms of a stated or perceived influence on the work in question). But he goes on to say:

Unfortunately, many recent attempts to upgrade dance criticism intellectually through the appropriation of the critical approaches of alternate cultural arenas have sacrificed critical accuracy and informativeness about dance for whatever intellectual allures are thought to exist in the greener pastures of other contexts of cultural debate.

("Options for Contemporary Dance Criticism," 1987, 141)

And though he frequently mentions relevant critical theory with respect, he avoids (and is seemingly averse to) its jargon and some of the uses to which it is put. In reviewing Perry Hoberman's 3-D slide shows ("Semiotics in 3-D," 1983), he remarks that he deplores "the kind of semiotic metaphysics Hoberman presumes; nowadays the concepts of codes, language, discourse, and text have been wildly overextended, beyond even metaphorical value." However, with typical evenhandedness, he admits that "Hoberman's ingenuity in making artistic emblems for this persuasion is irresistible" and if he "is not a rigorous thinker, he is a rigorous artist" (242).

However assertive Carroll may be, he remains able to see and consider several sides to an issue; he also maintains an engaging degree of modesty and self-deprecation. In the course...